


Even Though It's Wrong

by nagi_schwarz



Series: Play Along [11]
Category: Stargate Atlantis
Genre: F/M, M/M, band au, musician au
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-19
Updated: 2016-06-19
Packaged: 2018-07-16 01:33:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,560
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7246840
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nagi_schwarz/pseuds/nagi_schwarz
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Written for the comment_fic prompt: "author's choice, author's choice, <i>I wrote you a song / I don’t think you ever listened / I’ll sing it now / All the way through / I’ll sing it loud and proud and true.</i>"</p><p>Jennifer and Rodney find the song John wrote during the band's whisky-fueled attempt at songwriting.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Even Though It's Wrong

John and Rodney were crouched over John’s effects rack, armed with screwdrivers, wires, wire-strippers, and Rodney’s engineering know-how.

“You really didn’t know my mother died when I was sixteen?” John asked.

“No! Nobody told me. How could anyone expect me to know?” Rodney hissed. “Here, if we shift this one over and wire it through that one, it’ll make room for this one, but you’ll have to turn a little funny to hit it.”

John nodded and started unscrewing one of the pedals. “It was in the newspaper. That was how the entire rest of the town found out.”

“I tend not to read the newspaper.”

“So I gathered. Wait, no, if you wire it that way, it might short.” John held his hand out for the wire strippers and, to Jennifer’s amazement, Rodney actually surrendered them.

“So every time we performed Gone Away -”

“Yeah.”

“How many effects pedals can you possibly need?” Rodney asked.

“All of the ones on this rack,” John said, gesturing with his screwdriver. “That one’s for the solo on I Don’t Want You To Want Me, that’s for the chorus on Bang Bang Boom, that’s for the opening riffs of Fact Fiction -”

“Okay, okay! You’ve made your point. So all these years, you thought I was that much of a jackass.” Rodney sounded kind of hurt, and Jennifer itched to go comfort him, but for he and John this conversation had been a long time coming.

“You used to make our AP physics teacher cry,” John said. “You demanded excellence without excuse from yourself, and if you demanded it from the rest of us, and as irritating as that could be, it’s also...admirable.”

Jennifer smiled. Rodney really was a good guy, and she wasn’t the only one who could see it.

Rodney elbowed John aside and reached in to adjust a wire nut. “I can’t believe you lied to your father about being in the band. What is this, high school? Sneaking out the window to come to practice?”

“You saw how he reacted.”

“But you stood up to him.”

“I’m not sixteen anymore.”

Rodney sighed. “Is there anything else about you that everyone else knows that I somehow missed the memo on? Because you have to tell me these things. Our PA has started wearing a nametag and I still can’t remember if his name is Ivan or Evan.”

“I passed the MENSA test they gave us junior year,” John said after a thoughtful pause.

“ _What?_ ”

“Did you really think they kept putting me in AP physics and calculus and statistics and chemistry with you for fun?”

“I figured your father’s money - you’re in MENSA?”

“Nope. Didn’t join. Just passed the test.”

“You’re smarter than I thought you were.”

“I know.”

“But -” Rodney held out the wirecutters, snatched them back when John reached for them. “You let me _think_ you were stupid. You _played_ stupid.”

“You also sat next to me in every class and every AP test and they didn’t kick me out and they let me move on to the higher classes.” John plucked the wirecutters from Rodney’s grip and clipped a wire, stripped it, twisted it with the ends of another wire.

“I always thought -”

“Money isn’t everything, Rodney.”

“I know that. I was kind of a jerk, wasn’t it?”

“Well, you treat everyone equally. Jennifer excepted, of course.”

“And you were just okay with me being a jerk like that to you?”

“Like I said, not just me. I figured it was one of those irrational high school things, like you hated my hair or whatever.”

“I thought you’d broken my little sister’s heart.”

“She looks really torn up about it.” John smiled to soften his sarcasm. “Look, we’re in this together, all right? Even if we’re not BFFs, we make good music together, and that’s what counts. Now come on, get this wired. We’re starting on the road with The Snakeskinners in two days, and I don’t trust some roadie with my effects rack.”

“Evan and Elizabeth already know - no one touches your sound but me.”

“Wouldn’t have it any other way.” John sat back on his haunches, dragged a hand through his hair. “I think that’s good. Now, can we please go get some food before we rehearse? Because Jennifer’s starting to look like she’d taste good on rye, and I could totally take you in a fight.”  
  
Rodney made an indignant sound, but Jennifer said, “Actually, Kellers go better on a kaiser,” and John laughed.

He headed into the house to rustle up Ronon and Teyla, and Rodney stood up, stretched, then crossed the garage. He pulled Jennifer into a kiss, and she closed her eyes, settled against him. She hummed happily into the kiss, and then he growled, deepened it, his hands sliding lower. She giggled when he stroked over the curve of her behind, and he backed her toward the nearest vertical surface, and she let him lead, and then -

“Ow!”

The both went sprawling over Teyla’s cajon.

“You all right?” Rodney asked, getting up on his knees and tugging Jennifer into a sitting position. He ran his hands over her, checking for injury, and she smiled weakly.

“I’m fine. Just my pride banged up, really. Hopefully not the cajon, though.”

They both checked over the box drum, but it seemed none the worse for wear. Someone had been using it as a desk, and a series of notebooks were scattered across the floor of the garage. Jennifer knelt to pick one up and saw that it was filled with drunken scrawl and a drawing of a unicorn. From their drunken songwriting party.

But in one of the other notebooks was an actual song.

“What’s that?” Rodney asked. Jennifer held it out to him.

“That’s John’s handwriting,” Rodney said. He turned it around, scanned it. “Four chord pop song, of course a shift in the bridge. John! Get in here!”

John poked his head into the garage. “No, you get in here. We’re trying to figure out where to go for food, because we’re too tired to cook.”

“You wrote a song the night we got drunk, and you never told me,” Rodney said. “Come play it for me.”

“We have all the tracks we could want for the album,” John said. “I wanted to shift it around a bit more before I mentioned it.”

Rodney stood up, grabbed John’s wrist, and hauled him into the garage, shoved the guitar at him.

“Show me.”

John cast Jennifer an inscrutable look, but then he sat down on the cajon, tested the initial chord, and began to play the intro. He’d been working on this song a lot, if he could play it without even glancing at the notebook Rodney was holding out.

“I wrote it for Jennifer’s voice. I imagined it a bit more pop-y, less Teyla,” John said, and Jennifer nodded. Teyla had a voice made for soul and blues.

 _Do you dream that the world will know your name?_  
_So tell me your name_  
_Do you care about all the little things_  
_or anything at all?_

John was staring at his own hands, making sure he was hitting the chords right, but Jennifer knew he was singing about Rodney. Rodney, who was sure the world would know his name (and he was almost right about that). Rodney who cared about all the tiny details of their music but nothing else at all.

 _I wanna feel, all the chemicals inside_  
_I wanna feel_  
_I wanna sunburn, just to know that I'm alive_  
_To know I'm alive._

Something in John’s voice changed there, and Jennifer narrowed her eyes, but Rodney was nodding along to the music, making notes in the notebook with one of his ubiquitous pens.

 _Don't tell me if I'm dying_  
_'Cause I don't wanna know_  
_If I can't see the sun, maybe I should go_  
_Don't wake me 'cause I'm dreaming_  
_Of angels on the moon_  
_Where everyone you know_  
_Never leaves too soon._

Those last few lines were about John’s mother, Jennifer was sure of it. But the beginning of the chorus was something else, was -

Ronon and Teyla appeared in the doorway, listening, expressions solemn. They must have heard what Jennifer heard, then. John’s loss. But there was something more to the song, Jennifer was sure of it. She couldn’t quite put her finger on it.

“It’s good,” Rodney said, “but you’re right, it does need some re-tooling.”

John set the guitar aside and said, “Just trying to preserve your streak of being right. Officially. Now come on, let’s go get some food.”

Together, they piled into the Puddle Jumper. While they were at Tommy’s Burgers, a few girls asked for John and Ronon’s autographs, to pose for pictures with Teyla and Jennifer, and Jennifer smiled, pleased to interact with fans, but something about John’s song had stuck with her.  
It stuck with her for the next couple of days. She tried it out for herself, singing it, since John had chosen her to voice it.

And then, on Monday evening, when Jennifer arrived at Ronon’s house for rehearsal and saw how the others were making deserter and Marine jokes about John’s buzzed hair, she realized what John was really getting at with his song. It was in the first line of the chorus.

_Don’t tell me if I’m dying._

**Author's Note:**

> Title from "Kicking My Heels" by Tyler Hilton.
> 
> Song Credits:  
> I Don't Want You To Want Me - The Moffatts  
> Bang Bang Boom - The Moffatts  
> Fact Fiction - Mads Langer  
> Angels on the Moon - Thriving Ivory


End file.
